Tag biology

Meir Kryger— It is 3 a.m. You awaken sweating, your heart pounding. Your mind is racing, reminding you that you have to get up early to drop the kids off at daycare, then dash to work for an important meeting. Obsessed with your personal and work issues, you eventually fall

Jenny Diski— The great advantage over real live creatures that my Three Bears had in common with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, aside from not needing to be fed or produce droppings, was neoteny. Mickey and my ursine family looked only glancingly like a mouse or brown bears, and much more like babies.

Scott Solomon— In today’s world, it’s easy to imagine that the evolutionary forces that gave rise to our species are no longer at work. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson observed, but the callous forces of nature seem hardly to affect us when we live in

In the landmark 1986 book Origins of Sex, biologist Lynn Margulis and science writer Dorion Sagan trace the first appearance of sex back billions of years, to bacteria. Here, they describe the complex evolutionary history that their book will seek to untangle. The following is an excerpt from the introduction.

Benny Shilo— Traditional science regards the body as a collection of cells all carrying identical genetic information. The body cells generate specialized tissues that orchestrate the activity of an entire body. This view has been recently challenged, with new scientific findings showing that the microorganisms we carry in and on

The world comes alive again each spring: the bloom of nature and the return of busy outdoor activities. We’re inviting readers of the Yale University Press list to further explore our offering of titles on biology, nature, and biography to help us celebrate the renewal and span of life throughout

Follow @yaleSCIbooks In the epigram to Christian de Duve’s Genetics of Original Sin: The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humanity we find a verse from the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible where “the woman” eats the forbidden fruit of the tree, then gives it to the

Conventional narratives of evolution emphasize that organisms have evolved over time through the gradual accumulation of many genetic mutations, but for some researchers, this approach does not satisfactorily explain true biological novelty. This view, explored by Dr. Marc W. Kirschner and Dr. John C. Gerhart in The Plausibility of Life,

The Art of Frederick Sommer, winner of the 2005 Golden Light Award, Book of the Year, continues to receive accolades and enthusiastic reviews in publications across the country. American Photo (Jan/Feb 2006) includes the book among the “Best Photo Books of the Year,” and says, “This hefty retrospective of Sommer’s

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